Sometimes our worst enemies sneak up on us when we least expect them to. You think that everything in your life is perfect, but then you take one step off the path and suddenly you’re lost in the depths of woods. Darkness falls, and you think that you will rise in the morning and find your way back shortly, but you don’t. You keep on venturing further and further into the dark.

Where did it begin for me? Was it the day that I left the US to travel the world for the third time in a year? I was at the height of my happiness while visiting California, my favorite place on earth, for the first time in five years. I knew that was where I belonged— yet I left again for another unknown world, this time in the mystical, magical East.

I didn’t lose my balance right away, but I sure didn’t gain it and “find myself” like most travelers claim they do in Southeast Asia. In fact, for the first time in my year of traveling, I wasn’t finding myself in awe of the world. Sure, I could eat pad thai three times a day, and I was enjoying beachlife along the equator, but nothing stopped me in my sight as it had on my previous two trips. I felt my mind and body begin to slow down and become sluggish. My heart wasn’t in the same place that it was when I left the US the year before.

Since this world across the Pacific just wasn’t doing it for me, I decided to head back to more familiar territory to meet my mom in the country that has had the most lasting effect on me— Turkey.

Maybe it all began to roll rapidly downhill the moment we arrived in Cappadocia. I found myself nervously watching every person who passed me in the small town of Goreme, in hopes, but also fear that it would be you. I tried to fight the fear, but I knew that I had to face you again one day and this was my only chance.

And so we met again only for the second time in our lives, and for the first time in a year. Now the story of the aforementioned mystery man who I have referenced many times before is a whole story on it’s own. While he may have played a role in my downwards spiral, he was only a chapter in this tale of how a nomadic lifestyle almost brought me to an end…